​​We are so close to the dangerous limit of CO2 in the atmosphere that we are going to overshoot the safe levels and will have to make dramatic changes to maintain our way of life. There is not much that can be done about the population growing to eleven billion because, although we have passed peak birth rate, people are not dying as fast as they used to and it is the survival rate that is increasing the numbers. Hans Rosling does a very good Youtube explanation of population growth. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTznEIZRkLg

​So where can we make the changes to manage the planet in a sustainable way and, without a major war, keep everyone going until the population numbers fall naturally at the end of the century. The first step is to stop burning fossil fuels and move to clean (and cheap) renewable energy. We must change our food producing methods so that we can produce more food from the same, or smaller area of land and with much less cattle farming. Stop cutting down forests and start planting native trees for forests that are not going to be felled. Replace iron and cement production with other materials. Stop plundering our oceans for fish and dumping our rubbish in the rivers and sea. Lastly, we must start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to stop the planet heating up.

​The good news is that rapid advances in technology mean that the solutions are available to us now even if they need scaling up of production and getting the production costs right. Transport has largely been solved so that petrol cars can be described as the walking dead, and are being replaced by electric batteries. Burning coal to make electricity is an expensive form of energy and is also on the way out. It is the scale of production of wind, solar and geothermal energy backed up by batteries that is the time limiting factor. Tony Seba does a very good lecture on the rapid changes in the world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0

​For those who doubt these changes, we are already using drills and other tools that are not connected by electrical wire. Laptops are being dropped in favour of tablets. Mobile phones are smaller and longer lasting. Changes are coming very quickly.There are two technologies that can make a massive difference to our way of life and these are Graphene and MOF’s (Metal Organic Framework’s).

​Graphene is carbon that is made in a sheet one atom thick and is 200 times stronger than steel. It will conduct electricity better than copper, it can be used to transfer electronic data nearly as fast as light, it is so thin that it is nearly transparent and can filter liquids such as sea water to take out impurities or can store hydrogen without leakage for fuel tanks. ( https://www.explainthatstuff.com/graphene.html )These properties mean graphene can replace steel or aluminium in construction of planes or other vehicles, bridges and any structure needing strength and light weight. It will be used in the next generation of batteries to give increased power and durability for less weight. Imagine a solar/battery driven graphene plane.

​Metal Organic Frameworks are in a metal powder form that acts like a specialist sponge. It can be made in a form that can absorb water from the atmosphere in a desert and produce clean water for drinking. It can absorb CO2 from the atmosphere and then we can split out carbon for use or storage and return oxygen to the atmosphere. ( https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/mofs-find-a-use/2500508.article )

​Both these products are in their early stages but have massive, societal changing capability.

​Food production is not very efficient in many areas and we have degraded and abandoned about 25% of our farmland through erosion and bad practices. There are two ways of improving the conversion of land area to food productivity. One is by producing much more food in greenhouses where the climate is protected and there are no losses from weather and pests. They can be sited on poor quality land and even in deserts. ( https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-10-01/sundrop-farms-opens-solar-greenhouse-using-no-fresh-water/7892866 )

​The other area, which may not be so popular. is that we reduce our consumption of meat and dairy and eat alternative products made from vegetables. It takes 60,000 litres of water to make one kilogram of beef and we are running short of good water in many areas. Big improvements have been made in producing food from vegetable matter recently and when a minced beef, made from vegetable products that will make a suitable burger patty, the viability of the dairy sector will be undermined. ( https://sunfedfoods.com/ )

​The parts of climate change where there does not appear to be a solution are the state of the oceans, with fish stocks and ocean acidity, with sea level rise and changing weather patterns. All of these are extremely serious but we will have to deal with them while at the same time accommodating millions of people displaced from their homes.

In past times we have had pulses of sea level rise that have seen many metres in a few decades and as we only need one metre for economic and human disaster a lot of research is being done to understand if it could happen again.

n many ways circumstances are very different from those in a previous pulse of sea level rise as we are just past the peak of a warm period. The previous sea level pulses came from the melting of huge land based ice sheets on the North American and Asian continents which have now gone.

​The only remaining big ice sheets left are on Greenland and Antarctica and they can be divided into four different significant regions with very different circumstances and very different potentials for adding to sea level rise.

Antarctica is split into three regions of which by far the largest is East Antarctica with a potential to add about 60 metres to sea levels.East Antarctica is fortunately very high and extremely cold so there is no surface melting and most of the ice sits on rock so there is very little melting from underneath except where ice flows move out over the ocean. There is melting from the underneath of ice shelves around the edges and these ice shelves are massive but as they are already in the sea they do not contribute to sea levels. There is loss of ice but there is also snow falling in greater quantities on the shoulders of the continent and therefore there is only a modest loss of mass balance.

​The Antarctic peninsula is at a warmer latitude and is disintegrating, demonstrated by the ice shelves Larson A and Larson B having suddenly collapsed. The glaciers on the mountains behind these ice shelves have speeded up their progress to the sea, adding to sea level rise. Larson C has recently had a massive calving of 10% of its area and there are more splits in the remaining ice. Once again most of the ice loss is already in the sea and so, at the moment, it is a minor addition to sea level rise. Still all these bits add up and we only need one metre for disaster.

West Antarctica has a whole series of glacier streams of which the Thwaites and Pine Island are the most significant. Global warming has increased the heat differential between the South pole and the tropics and the katabatic winds at the coast are now stronger. As they blow offshore they blow surface water away from the coast and consequently warmer water is sucked up from the deep to replace it.

​This deep water is relatively warm at +2C and is melting the ice shelf from below and this is where it starts to get interesting.

The warm water melts the ice from below and as the ice shelf thins it breaks up, just as Larson’s A, B and C have, and the ice shelf retreats. As it gets closer to the coast the ice is sitting on the sea floor and much thicker and higher than floating ice.Ice is brittle and has a maximum size that it can maintain before it collapses. This would be a cliff face of 90metres above sea level and above that it will collapse.

​This illustration is the classic profile of a glacier and ice shelf.

​When the ice shelf retreats due to warm water melting and break up it will eventually reach this thicker ice, and then it will collapse very quickly because it is unstable. This ice will add to sea levels because some of it is not floating.This process of rapid collapse would quickly get back to land based glacier which, without buttressing support would quickly start slipping into the sea. This scenario could produce a pulse of sea level rise.The illustration leads you from A to F and shows how the warmer melts the ice from below, when the melting gets past a shallow ridge on the sea floor B the warm water reaches deep behind the ice face C and collapses the floating ice shelf. D + E shows how the retreating ice reaches thicker grounded ice. The last illustration F shows the unstable cliff face of the thicker ice and this is the point of rapid collapse.​In summary the Antarctic region is currently has a nett loss of 125 gigatons of ice a year which would raise sea levels by 0.3 mm a year. 3 mm a decade does not sound much, but much of the current melting is of ice that is already in the sea, it is accelerating and when the shelve are gone the glaciers behind them will start to slip and they will add significantly towards the one metre disaster level.

Greenland is relatively accessible from the USA and Europe and so it is well researched. It is suffering a whole host of problems partly because it is closer to the warmer latitudes than Antarctica. By comparison Greenland spans from 60 Deg. to 80 Deg., the North of Scotland is 60 Deg. and the Antarctic Peninsula spans 65 Deg. to 75 Deg.The central plateau of Greenland is 3000 metres high and up until recently it did not melt but since the late 1990’s it has been melting quite frequently. Some of this is due to rising temperatures but it is made worse by dark soot from industry, aeroplanes and forest fires, covering the clean reflective snow, absorbing heat and encouraging melting. Once the snow has melted it is a darker colour and becomes significantly less reflective and more prone to absorbing heat.The warm water melts its way down through the ice and forms holes called moulins which carry the water deep into the bed of the ice sheet. This warm water will unstick the ice from the bedrock so that 3-kilometre-thick ice will lurch suddenly towards the ocean. In some cases, the water makes its way to the sea and adds to sea level but in other cases it sits inside the ice as a reservoir of liquid water and may become part of a later pulse in rapid sea level riseSatellite measurements show that the surface of Greenland is dropping noticeably and the meltwater is adding to sea level rise.Around the coast of Greenland, it is suffering the same problems as West Antarctica with deeper warm water, melting from below the ice tails of the glaciers that sit in the water. As these glaciers melt and break up they no longer buttress ice from further up the valleys, which increases their speed to the sea.

​The four above scenarios illustrate the various threats of a sea level pulse and where the main culprits are. Overall there is no stopping sea level rise but the scientific community is trying to do research on the timing. With over 400 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere we are committed to a 20-metre sea level rise. it’s all about the timing.

​The graph below by Tim Naith shows CO2 levels on the left-hand side with sea levels at the top and temperatures at the bottom.The yellow dot represents today. The black dot is the peak of the last warm period with CO2 levels at 300 ppm and sea levels 7 metres higher than today.The first large red cross is 3 million years ago when CO2 levels were at 400 ppm and sea levels were 20 metres higher and it was 3 C warmer.The second red cross is where we are headed with CO2 at 500 ppm, sea levels 40 metres higher and the temperature 5 C higher.This information came from core samples taken from the seabed in Antarctica in the Andrill research project. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZHRwDHh4B0

There is always speculation on the behavior of the Polar vortex as the Arctic sea ice disappears and the way that it will affect the weather around the world.One theory is that as the ice disappears and the Arctic ocean warms the next coldest spot would be the high plateau of Greenland and the polar vortex might centre on that with the subsequent chaos to weather patterns in the Northern hemisphere.In the recent invasion of warm air into the Arctic when the temperature was 30C above normal a minor Polar vortex formed over Greenland which gives some credence to the theory.

Having just done a post on the unstable weather conditions due to the warm water in the Tasman Sea I had a quick look at Met Vuw.​There is a tropical storm coming down from the Pacific, which is a bit early in the season but not unusual.

What is interesting is that the storm is forecast to go down the West coast and over the warm water in the Tasman Sea where it picks up heat and energy, it intensives and the pressure drops tp 992.​To make it worse the storms southwards path is blocked by a high pressure system and it gets stuck.​Much like the hurricane that struck Texas.

This is a four day forecast and a lot can change but you can see the effects of the warm water in the forecast.

​The ocean water in the Tasman sea is up to 6 C warmer than normal and it will have an unpredictable effect on the weather. The first and obvious outcome would be that the extra heat will raise the moisture content of the atmosphere by 8% for every extra degree of temperature rise and the extra heat can drive stronger storms.

Instead of rain we are in a drought so what’s happening?New Zealand has a ridge of mountains down the West coast that effectively stops rain getting past them and we need easterly winds to bring us rain to our populated areas. The current drought is due to the increased prevalence of Westerly winds due to global warming in the Southern Ocean and the very warm weather is due to the warm water in the Tasman Sea warming the winds.

We have also had sunny, clear skies due to the high-pressure systems coming from the west. High pressure systems are from dry air descending from 10,000 metres and effectively blot out low pressure systems which rise from the sea and rise to 3000 or 5000 metres shedding moisture and heat as they ascend.Drought is the biggest killer to our environment and to our farming economy and food production. It can kill millions of trees, dry up streams and destroy grass and other farming produce.

​Powerful rainstorms wash away topsoil and flood our estuaries with silt as well as causing damage to our infrastructure and homes. So what can we expect?The drought is already with us and we still have the warmest part of the summer months to come so we can expect it to intensify. There must also be a big risk of powerful rainstorms causing flood damage but that is less predictable and are more likely to happen later in the summer or autumn.

The water in he Tasman sea is around 4C above normal which is a big worry. So much is unknown about this type of event. Will it be there long? What effect will it have on the weather?Currently the weather is dominated by a high pressure system so we are having a spell of warm weather but an ocean with these extreme temperature must have an effect of some kind on our islands. ​Extreme drought or floods?.

The very fast pace of change in our modern world means that one generation is not going to be the same as the last, as even the last ten years has shown. Planning for the future needs and open mind and a good sense of social awareness.To get an idea of the changes that are very close to us now I suggest that you watch this video of Tony Seba and reflect on the many social issues that will come from it.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b3ttqYDwF0&t=93s&list=FLiUwiBc_bp0xCGnsJ2LL2Tg&index=4The video portrays some massive changes, many of which are apparent today, which will bring massive disruption to our lives and if we are to avoid massive social unrest we need to be planning for the future with a completely different mindset.

Universal wage.The election has brought to the surface retirement pensions and the thorny issue of what age to fix it at. We also have the problem of social benefits for illness and unemployment. Lurking around the edges is the idea of the universal wage, so some people are considering changes to our social structure already. For those not familiar with the concept of a Universal Wage here is some text from WikipediaBasic income is potentially a much simpler and more transparent welfare system than the one existing in the welfare states around the world today.[11] Instead of having numerous welfare programs, it would simply be one universal unconditional income. This strategy for introducing basic income is controversial because some basic income supporters argue that it should be added to the existing welfare system rather than a replacement for it.Many hard working people do not take kindly to some people getting a living and not working, but there are bigger issues at stake and mass unemployment is a distinct possibility and it could lead to political and social instability.We currently have unemployment rates of around 5% but governments, worldwide are notoriously devious about those figures and hide it with education and retraining plans which, in a way, accepts that there are not enough jobs to employ all those who want to work and so they go for retraining to take them off the unemployment lists.One of the big advantages of a universal wage is that it takes the pressure off people and they then start using their creative ability to start small enterprises to earn extra money or to do good social or environmental work.

Pensions​Here are some thoughts on the where we could have a floating retirement age where, you can choose your own retirement date starting from age sixty but the longer you leave it the more you get. The average actuarial age of death is well researched and so the government know how much they will have to pay out to the retired population. If you are a New Zealand male you are going to die (on average) at 79.1 years old. Currently pension is paid from 65 and so there are about 14.1 years of payment at $691.44 a fortnight totalling $253,481.90. If you chose to retire early at 60 you would get 19.1 years of pension and so you would get $510.43 a fortnight. If you had a hard life or illness you might prefer to retire early and make the most of it.If we can get more people to retire early it will make room for younger people to get jobs.As mentioned at the beginning there are massive technological social and environmental changes coming and we need to have a very open mind to avoid big social problems.

I asked a scientist friend of mine who works on the UN agreement to limit the use of CFC’s gasses, which are used in refrigerators and cause the hole in the ozone layer. ‘Why is it that the industrial Northern hemisphere countries emit the CFC’s and we, in the Southern Ocean have the hole in the ozone layer and its lack of protection exposes us to cancer from sunburn’.This is a very shortened version of her explanation.

CFC gas is released in the Northern hemisphere and because the gas is light it rises into the upper atmosphere with warm air and, in the strong circulating upper atmosphere winds, it is carried down to the equator where it crosses to the Southern hemisphere.

The CFC’s have a chemical reaction that kills ozone when exposed to extreme cold and UV light. Antarctica is different to the North Pole because it is very high and as a result it is very cold. In the spring when the sun returns to the South Pole, with the combination of the UV light and extreme cold the CFC’s react with the Ozone and destroy it.

​The circular motion of the Southern Ocean winds holds the ozone depleted hole in the atmosphere in position and stops it being repaired by fresh ozone, which means that there is a single large region that has no ozone in the upper atmosphere.

​The North pole does have depleted ozone regions but they are smaller and split into two or three patches.

The very fact that the countries of the world came together to reach an agreement to stop using CFC's and use a less harmful gas was incredible. Then, when they realised that the CFC replacement was also a harmful greenhouse gas, they came to a new agreement and adopted a gas that had almost zero greenhouse gas emissions.There is some hope that we can collectivly get CO2, methane and other greenhouse gasses under control and avoid the very worse of climate change.

We are already geoengineering the planet by pumping CO2 into the atmosphere to raise the temperature and by cutting down and burning trillions of trees to make farmland plus a lot of other ways. ​It’s a dangerous practise that could be going to bring a lot of problems for humanity but here is one that might help farmers and is something to think about.

Australia is a country with a very flat and barren interior and I have often speculated what it would have been like If it had a range of mountains right down the middle, which would have created rain clouds to feed rivers and make the centre fertile and probably cooler. Constructing a wall high enough to do the same thing as a mountain is not an option but we could use a different technology.

The Spanish have been researching hot air thermal generators to make electricity and one of the side effects is that there has been noticed a downwind tear drop area of green growth. This is caused by the hot air rising from the chimney and pushing some moisture into the upper atmosphere where the moisture condenses and falls as rain.

If a line of big thermal chimneys were constructed and placed in a line down route A71 between Charleville and Bourke it would be close enough to the grid to take away the electricity and, in a farming region which is on the brink of productivity due to a lack of rainfall moisture, it could increase farming productivity substantially.​These chimneys are not wildly expensive to build and make cheap electricity but the real benefit would be to farming where even a small increase in rainfall would be a huge benefit. Instead of destroying farmland by digging coal, which is a diminishing energy source, and spending a billion dollars on a railway which would only be for coal movement the Queensland government would do better by looking at alternative investments.It needs some research into its effect into the upper atmosphere but it could work.

CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing at an accelerating rate despite the knowledge and advise to governments that this is a ruinous policy. At over 405 parts per million we are faced with sea level rise of 12 metres and a temperature rise of 2C or more and when this starts to hurt the population hard decisions will have to be made.The and IPCC have already set out some suggestions which are, cease burning fossil fuels, adopt a human diet and farming regime with minimum cattle and start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Statements that are easily made but politically difficult and yet this is what we will have to do eventually.In New Zealand, we burn hardly any coal for making electricity but our two big greenhouse gas emitting areas are transport and farming. If we accept that electric transport is imminent and will replace oil powered cars in ten or twenty years’ time then we have to look at our farming activities and also try to work out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Both very difficult decisions for different reasons, cattle and sheep farming are central to the New Zealand economy and we do not currently have the technology to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and will have to rely on natural solutions.While driving in remote farming regions near Taranaki and Whanganui I was struck by the way that our early farmers denuded the countryside of trees by logging and burning to convert the bush into land suitable for sheep and cattle.

This is a fairly typical country scene and shows the lack of trees and the soil erosion. Sheep (and cattle) eat every green plant and trees can not grow back while they are on the land.

This shows areas where sheep are not on the land and the trees have grown back to restore the natural bush.My argument is that many areas of sheep farming are barely economic and it would make sense to put that land into retirement, as they do in Europe, by paying the farmers not to farm and regenerating the land with native trees that are not going to be felled.This is not a modest undertaking and we will be desperate when we start it. We are burning 3,800 million tonnes of coal A YEAR, and it is 80% carbon so you can imagine how much CO2 is in the atmosphere (oil is additionally a similar figure).It takes 40 trees to absorb a tonne of carbon so the scale of it is immense but as we are already in a dire situation, which is quickly getting worse and natural disasters, caused by the planets rising temperatures, will force the politicians to start listening to the scientists and the people and not vested interests who want to continue with ‘business as usual’

It is well known that there are natural cycles to the earth’s climate and that we move between ice ages and warm periods, a process that takes 125,000 years and cyclical process that has lasted two and a half million years. This cycle is caused by a combination of movements by our planet that increases its tilt and its distance from the Sun, but what increases the temperature and melts the ice is the increase in amount of greenhouse gasses.​ CO2 levels increase from 180 parts per million to 280 parts per million and this is sufficient to raise temperature 7C and melt ice that would have been 4 kilometres thick in Canada and Northern Europe.The earth now has a CO2 level of 407 part per million and it is still rising fast due to our burning of coal and oil. CO2 will last in the atmosphere for hundreds or thousands of years and is only absorbed by the environment very slowly. This level of CO2 has not been seen for 3.5 million years and we then had temperatures 3C warmer than today and sea levels 12 metres higher than today.The problem is that we have not stopped increasing our production of CO2 and in fact are still speeding up the rate of production and will probably pass 550 parts per million or more before we get it under control.Scientists believe that we are heading for a point very soon when we will break the cycle of ice ages and the planet will stay hot for thousands of years with temperatures 4c or 5C warmer than today and sea levels approaching 60 metres higher depending on how much of the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheet melts.Although the timescale for some of this is long, short term changes will devastate the economies and lifestyles of most people alive today.

The big money in Australia is in coal mining and the Coalition Government of Australia is committed to preserving it at all costs even though they have signed the UN COP21 agreement to reduce emissions. They have abolished the carbon tax, reduced the climate change activity of their climate scientists and reduced activity in renewable energy as part of this plan and can not see the link between burning coal and the record breaking temperatures in Australia.

There is always debate about how sensitive the planet is to small changes or is it robust enough to resist the damage that people are doing and continue to deliver an unchanged environment.One indicator might be the slight increase in inclination that is caused every 125,000 years by Jupiter, which starts the onset of a warm periods where the temperature will rise 5 C.In the Earth's natural state the temperature is 5 C cooler than today and there would be ice two kilometers thick over North America, down to New York and over Russia with thick ice down to Germany and Scotland.This change is caused by an increase of inclination of just 2.4 degrees. Sufficient to change the climate completely.​http://globalwarmingsimplified.weebly.com/the-planet-cycles-between-cold-ad-warm-periods.html

Recent analysis has revealed that the Southern Ocean has increased its speed by 30% in recent years and this will serious consequences for us all.​It means that the climate models will be underestimating the rate of melting to the ice in Antarctica and the strength of the wind in places like New Zealand will have a higher proportion of strong Westerlies.This year in particular New Zealand has had a succession of strong westerly winds which has brought flooding to the west coast but also drought to the populated areas in the east.The technical reasons for the drought are dealt with here. ​http://www.climateoutcome.kiwi.nz/drought.htmlThe report on the original research is here. ​https://eos.org/research-spotlights/notorious-ocean-current-is-far-stronger-than-previously-thought#.WIbgaF8rGdU.twitter

When discussing an ice free Arctic we dont need to be too particular about the minimum amount and one million square kilometres would be considered so low that it might just be ice free.The effect on the weather in the populated regions just South of the Arctic region can be devastating. North America, UK and Europe, Russia and China can all have extreme weather with floods, freezing winters or drought which can put a huge strain on the economies and the lives of the people.The loss of Arctic ice is the fastest reaction to climate change. There is no waiting for half a century for the ice to melt and sea levels to rise. This is almost instantaneous.